MASTERS
Dodge’s UVM college ski team (Dodge is
second from left in the top row).
Rich, Dodge
and Eastern
masters racer
Wes Wisse are
competitive in
the off-season,
too.
Rich and
Dodge share
the podium.
and when he started racing, made the trip over to Can-
non Mountain in New Hampshire. “It cost 25 cents a ride
back then,” says Dodge. “We’d go up and then try to beat
the tram car back down to the base. We couldn’t turn
very well, but we were pretty good at going straight.” High
school racing consisted of challenging the skiers at Lyn-
donville for an afternoon race, and then returning to St.
Johnsbury to play in a high school basketball game.
After a stint in the Marine Corps toward the end of the
war, Dodge reluctantly headed down the road to Vermont
Junior College and then transferred to the University of
Vermont so that he could continue to ski race. “I didn’t
think I was smart enough to go to college,” says Dodge,
“but I thought I’d better take advantage of the GI Bill.”
Like all collegiate racers at the time, Dodge competed
in all four events. “I stunk at cross-country but I jumped
pretty well,” says Dodge. He goes on to tell the story of
when he was on top of the large Middlebury College ski
jump, nursing the remnants of a late-night escapade. As
he nervously watched, the jumper in front of him went
over the knoll, slowly rotated upside down and then never
reappeared on the runout. “As soon as the ambulance
cleared the landing area, the flagman signaled that it was
time for me to go. I went, but decided I’d rather focus on
alpine skiing.”
After college, Dodge married, had four children, and went
to work as vice president of construction at Caledonia Inc,
one of the largest contractors in the state. Dodge’s two
boys, David Jr. and Peter, both were collegiate All-Ameri-
can ski racers with Peter going on to the U.S. Ski Team
before establishing himself as one of the better pro skiers
on the tour. David, now an engineer and ski equipment
designer, is the creator of Dodge Ski Boots, while Peter
is head alpine coach at Dartmouth College.
With the children up and on their own in the late 1970s,
Dodge decided that he’d spent enough time in an office,
and it was time to go ski racing and play golf. “After chas-
ing my children around the Northeast for so many years,”
he says, “I decided that it looked like fun and I might as
well do it myself.” Dodge served on the New England
Masters board of directors for many years, and estab-
lished himself as one of the better racers on the tour. He
ran off a string of seven national titles starting in 2000,
and hopes to go after another this year. “If I can hang to-
gether until March I’d like to race the Nationals and Inter-
national Criterium,” says Dodge. “If I can still do it, I might
as well keep at it.”
Paul Rich, who now lives in Laconia, N.H., grew up in
a somewhat parallel universe just across the river from
Dodge in Newbury, N.H. “I used to live right next to what is
now Sunapee Ski Area,” says Rich. “I went to high school
in Warner, where we skied on a little rope tow in town.
The jump was in Bradford.” Rich and his teammates also
used to pack out a trail to the summit of Sunapee and
then race down before Sunapee was developed into a ski
area in the late 1940s.
Like Dodge, Rich skied all four events in high school and
college, and excelled in cross country and alpine. His ski-
ing skills took him to the University of New Hampshire,
where he skied the carnival circuit just three years after
Dodge. “I remember skiing in the Dartmouth Carnival and
the next day we’d race in Eastern races,” says Rich. “I
won one of those. And then later that year I raced in the
Wildcat downhill, which was combined with the Gibson
